Blake - In the Rogue Blood

I n the summer of 1845 Edward Little was sixteen years old and restless in his blood. He knelt beside a tree stump next to the stable and carved intently upon it in the first gray light of day. He had often sat on this stump and watched the sun lower into the trees and wondered how great the distance from where he sat to where the day was still high noon. His family fled to this blackwater wildland just east of the Perdido and nearly two days ride north of Pensacola in the fall of 42 when Daddyjack hied them out of the Georgia uplands following a barndance fracas that left a man dead and occasioned the local constable to initiate inquiry. The killed man was named Tom Rainey. He was a childhood acquaintance of Edwards mother and made bold to ask her for a turn on the dance-floor. She shook her head as much in warning as in refusal, but before he could turn away, there was Daddyjack before him redeyed with drink and much offended by Raineys familiarity toward his wife. Hard words abruptly gave way to grappling and folk jumped clear as a table overturned and then Rainey was staring down in wide-eyed wonder at the knife haft jutting from his breastbone and tight in Daddyjacks grip. Edward was thirteen and had seen men die under felled trees and from a mulekick to the head and in wildeyed fever in their bunks, but this was his first witness to mankilling and his blood jumped at the swift and utter finality of its decree and at the resolute set of Daddyjacks face as he gave the blade a hard twist before yanking it free. Rainey staggered and his face sagged as he gaped at the scarlet bloom on his shirtfront and then his eyes rolled up white and he dropped dead. Daddyjack got the family out of there fast as people fell away from the door. The boy was dry-mouthed and nearly breathless with the sense of having just seen something of himself, something at once dreadful and exhilarating and ascendant and not to be denied, some fierce region of his own being that awaited him like a badland horizon red as Hell.

Their covered wagon had lurched along toward Florida on narrow muddy traces that wound through deep pine forests and traversed marsh prairies and skirted shadowy swamplands where the moss hung heavy and the evening haze flared with will-o-the-wisp. Daddyjacks horse trailed on a lead rope and their two dogs trotted alongside. At the infrequent crossroads there was sometimes an inn where Daddyjack would rein up the team and step inside to sample a cup of the local distillate while Edward and his brother John watered the animals and listened to the conversations of passing travelers. More than one group of pilgrims they met was headed for the Republic of Texas. The emigrants had all been told the place beggared description and they spoke as if theyd already seen it with their own eyesthe towering pinewoods and fertile bottomlands, the long curving seacoast and rolling green hills, the vast plains that ranged for countless miles out to the western mountains. Theyd been assured a man could make a good life for himself in Texas if he but had the grit to stand up to the Mexican army and the roving bands of red savages. It was anyhow sure to become a state before long, Mexican objections be damned. Daddyjack overheard a bunch of them one time and as he hupped the mules back onto the southern track he shook his head and muttered about fools who thought they could get away from themselves in Texas or any other damned place.

One drizzly afternoon on the drive to Florida, when Edward and his brother and sister were sitting with their mother in the back of the wagon as Daddyjack drove the mule team through the blowing mist with water running from his hatbrim, she whispered to them that Jack Little was a murderous man never to be admired and much less trusted. They were the first words she had uttered in over a year and for a moment Edward was not certain if she had actually spoken or he had somehow heard the thoughts inside her head. That man will eat you up, she hissed. All you. If you dont kill him first.

The girl nodded with tightlipped accord and stared fiercely at her brothers. The brothers exchanged uncertain looks. Daddyjacks voice rasped into the wagon: Id rather go on not hearin your mouth a-tall than have to hear such crazywoman talk.

She said nothing more that night or for the next three years, but the fervor in her eyes did look to Edward like the gleam of lunacy.

Their mother was a fairskinned supple beauty with sharp features, but neither Daddyjack nor the children knewnot the woman herself knewthat her roiled green eyes and darkly auburn hair were inherited from a murderous brute who begat her atop a thirteen-year-old girl as the rest of his bandit party whooped over the flaming wagons on a cold South Georgia afternoon and the girls family lay about in twisted slaughter. The childmother never recovered from the ordeals visitation of madness and she spoke not another word for the brief rest of her life. She wandered in the scrub for days before a tinker came upon her and carried her in his wagon to the next town on his route where she was housed by a grocer and his wife until they realized she was with child and passed her on to the grocers spinster sisters. A few weeks after the birth of her daughter she hanged herself from a rafter in her room. Her suicide was the favored conversational topic among the locals for some time but the gossipry soon made even the details of her death as uncertain as all else about her. In time all tales told of her were but fancies.

The infant was taken to raise by a childless Methodist minister named Gaines and his sallow dispirited wife who were on their way to settle in the high country. The reverend christened her Lilith and told everyone she was his niece who had been orphaned by the cholera. She grew up a quiet observant girl who read the Bible and practiced her hand by copying passages from the Song of Solomon, which the reverends good wife was disturbedand the reverend himself secretly piquedto learn was her favorite portion of the Good Book. She had just turned twelve and offered no resistance when the preacher deflowered her one late evening as his consumptive spouse coughed away her life in an adjoining room. Six weeks later, on the night following his wifes funeral, he lay with the girl again and wept even as he grunted with the labor of his lust. He told her it was the Lords own will that they commit their flesh one to the other and she smiled at his tears and said it was wonderful that the Lord willed such a pleasurable thingand then laughed at his gaping astonishment at her brazenness. He took her to his bed nearly every night thereafter.